News and notes for the medieval philosophy community

Monthly Archives: May 2018

Before going on my customary summer hiatus, let me make a final request to all of you. I’ve been thinking about a survey of medieval philosophy that I’m teaching in the fall, and thinking about the canon in medieval philosophy. I’d like to investigate these matters by collecting syllabi from survey classes of medieval philosophy. If you have any such syllabi, I’d be grateful if you’d send them to my collaborator in this project, Mark Boespflug. Send us multiple versions, if you’ve got them. Send us anything that’s in the neighborhood of a “survey” of medieval philosophy. Bear in mind, we’re just interested in the readings that you’ve assigned. But even if you’ve just used a single textbook, send us that (along with which details about which chapters from the textbook you’ve assigned). Assuming we get enough of these to make it worthwhile, we’ll post a tally in the fall of which readings in the field have the greatest claim to being canonical, judged from how often they’re taught.

A great summer to all. I myself am headed down under, to where it’s winter, for a few months. Back in August.

I have just learned from Jean-Baptiste Brenet that Carlos Bazán has died today, after an extended period of illness.

In view of his many distinguished contributions to medieval philosophy in general, and Thomas Aquinas in particular, it is surprising that there is essentially no information available on the internet about Professor Bazán’s career. Comments to this post might be a suitable venue for such information, if anyone would like to offer a contribution.

Among the latest news in the field, first and always foremost, is that a new job in medieval philosophy has been posted at Dominican University College in Ottawa. It’s listed as a tenure-track assistant professor position, though in the very next sentence the job description seems to say that it’s at most a three-year position. A query to the dean about this seeming contradiction produced no reply. Adding to the mystery is that the job is not advertised on PhilJobs.org, which rather undermines the claim of the ad that “Applications are encourage [sic] from all qualified women and men.” Notice that the position requires “teaching competence in both English and French.”

There’s a major conference on the history of logic sponsored by Alain de Libera at the Collège de France next week, mostly focused on medieval material (Paris, May 14-15, 2018). Details here.

The Aquinas and “the Arabs” International Working Group is meeting in August in Mexico City (August 23-25, 2018, Universidad Panamericana). I’m afraid the call for papers expired May 1, but folk who are interested might contact the organizers about whether there’s still room on the program.

The heroic efforts of Alexis Bugnolo to print an English translation of the entirety of Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary have run into some difficulty. It seems the publisher is unwilling to continue stocking the 2300 remaining copies of volume 1, and is threatening to destroy them. If you’d like to do your part to save an endangered book, you can purchase a copy here. (Thanks to John Inglis for this information.)

Unfortunately, perhaps as a kind of collateral damage from these efforts at publication, it seems that the freely available electronic translations of this work are no longer available at the Franciscan Archive.

It’s not quite too late, though only a few hours are left, to submit a paper to the SMRP’s Founder’s Award Prize. Graduate students and PhDs within the last five years are eligible. Deadline is today, May 1.

Congratulations to Peter Adamson, whose History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast has just made its way to the end of the Middle Ages, and posted its 300th episode, not counting the 62 episodes he’s completed on Indian philosophy, and a few more in the newly started series on African philosophy. Next up is Byzantium, which I suppose means he isn’t really done with the Middle Ages. And doubtless there’s still Renaissance scholasticism to look forward to. Lest you think this a quixotic project, you might like to know that the total number of podcast downloads stands at 21 million. What’s your citation index?

While I’m congratulating Peter, I might as well mention that he also recently won a large European Research Council grant for his project on animals in Islamic philosophy.

Also, check out Peter’s interview on the APA Blog, in which he talks about diversifying the canon. (I myself recently weighed in on this topic, in an interview at 3am.)

The British Journal for the History of Philosophy is looking for a new associate editor who would oversee submissions in medieval philosophy. Application deadline is May 25, 2018. (Thanks to Caleb Cohoe for the pointer. I’m told Peter Adamson will NOT be applying for this job.)

I’ve discovered a remarkable web page devoted to medieval commentaries on the Bible at big.hypotheses.org/. It contains much information about the medieval Latin Bible, the common gloss, and various later medieval commentaries, including, among much else, a working electronic edition of Aquinas’s Catena aurea. For the electronic version of the Glossa ordinaria, see here.

The folks at the Aquinas Institute, who have been busily publishing big bilingual editions of Aquinas’s Opera, are now starting to make available ebooks, formatted to be read on your Kindle or other such device. For a small fee, you get a Latin-English text that is designed to be read on a portable reader, and that even lets you look up Latin vocabulary on your screen.